123713-whats-the-actual-population-game-rl-numbers
Content ---- They don't really give us the overall population numbers, but we do have a more concrete picture of on-server player density and concurrency (which is the important part anyway). We have a bit in our quest log that shows "nearby players". I don't necessarily know what "nearby" means, though I know it doesn't capture all of Academy Corner in Thayd. There is a spot you can get the auction house and the nearest three crafting areas, though, and I take a look at that every now and then. That's a pretty dense patch of ground as far as players go. On Entity, this hovers between about 50 players in off hours to over 120 during peak hours. During Thaydfest, we were up towards 200. Just in that patch of ground, just the people actually at the AH/CX and using the three nearest crafting stations. That's a lot, especially considering how many other places people can be (housing plots, there are two other AH/CX in Thayd, one of which generally has a few people, the new level 50 instance daily area in the traverse tunnels, actually playing the game, etc.) Last time I was leveling low-level (I was on a level 25 Engineer in Whitevale), there were generally 2-3 players in range at any one time, with that number going as high as ten near the crafting station in Thermock (remembering that this is just in my general vicinity), maybe 30 meters or so? Now, the PVP servers are MUCH less populated since most of their populations emigrated over, but you'll have enough people to play with. Player volume and density doesn't really seem to be an issue, though there is still some trepidation over people queueing up (there is still a lower queueing population from 1-49). Drop 5 Contracts should put even more people into the open world, though. Once you hit 50, queues have REALLY picked up with the new dailies and currencies. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- What time CST would be Primetime | |} ---- Generally anytime between about 5pm Central to about 1pm Central. The game skews older, generally, so there are more of us at work midday as a percentage of population. | |} ---- Now I'm almost convinced you don't play the game. | |} ---- ---- There are usually probably 200 people just milling around Academy Corner and it's associated guild and crafting areas on primetime on Entity. Just Academy Corner. | |} ---- Are we playing the same game? | |} ---- Are you looking at your "nearby players" count there? Yes. I checked this weekend. | |} ---- ---- I think Leylin is talking about right this second, while a majority of players are at work. | |} ---- You may be right. That is why I specifically noted primetime, though. | |} ---- well two of the servers look like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoU0DP0S8sU and two other servers I would describe as medium pop. Something like what Hazak looked at Autumn. If you're not going to be trying to play on PvP servers though, then it shouldn't matter how the game is doing overall as PVE servers still have enough people to do things with. | |} ---- ---- last quarter they couldn't pay the bills though :I And my stance is when servers hit such a black hole, they should be closed all together. Now they just look bad for anyone that will happen to free trial on them. | |} ---- Last quarter was the lowest population point there's been, by far. Pop is an awful lot higher now than it was in November. There is a point there about the PVP servers being empty, but the question is if they'd lose players if the servers went away (there are plenty of people saying they wouldn't play without a PVP server). Who knows, maybe they're putting together a singular central server that splits off PVP versions of instances. What I can say is that there's going to be a division in the upcoming daily hub that makes it PVP or PVE depending, or so I've heard from those on PTR. So it sounds like they're going to try to give people a reason to stay. All of which might help, but we're going to need to merge the CX/AH of the servers together if they want people to go back. That was the first, second, and third complaints from most players on the PVP servers who transferred. | |} ---- ---- I know, it's uncomfortable talking about concrete metrics instead of spitballing and anecdotal observations. | |} ---- Well, it's uncomfortable to read anyways. 1st quarter 2015 won't be out until mid April at the earliest. I think that is what they were referring to in that post. | |} ---- It would have more meaning if nothing in the game had changed since then. But since there has been so much content, and an uptick in players recently, its meaning carries a little less weight. Also given that the response from Carbine was that of admitting mistakes, correcting them, and moving forward with great new content. And the response from NCSoft was one of continuing to have full support of the game. There's plenty of reason to be annoyed that it has been brought up for so long. Not like anything new has come out of the report anyway. | |} ---- ---- No I just typically always the see same people in thayd, dungeons, and pvp. Plus consider there are only like ~15 guilds on the exile side on entity now. So you're talking about a population of maybe 400-500 raiders. I can't imagine there are THAT many casuals. So I guess I'd up my estimate to say a few thousand players not a few hundred. However the amount of players who actually que dungeons and pvp is far smaller. Also to clarify, I'd like to see this game succeed as well, but it just seems like some of you have delusional beliefs about the size of the player base that hurt discussions about what needs to happen to fix things... Because right now the game is not in a good spot. | |} ---- I've said this before, but my guild often has 20 people online. I rarely see more than one or two of us in Academy Corner at a time. And yes, there are far more than 15 guilds on Entity. You may have a skewed perception because very few of us actually queue. That doesn't seem like a population problem as much as a sociological one. If you're looking for people that queue, you'll maybe only see one or two of my guildies in dungeon queues at 50, maybe a few more in PVP. The rest of us premake guild groups. It's perfectly possible you've never seen a Blazing Saddles tag in a queue for months. It's not that we aren't playing, we're just not where you can always see us. | |} ---- I would just like to know where you are getting any of your numbers. | |} ---- I was listing in my head all the guilds I could think of, which works on a server as small as entity. I checked here (http://www.wildstarlogs.com/servers/34/) and I'm counting 22 so I guess I missed a few. I think it's safe so say there's a max ~25 raiding guilds which still puts you around 500 raiders on the exile side. | |} ---- We don't all raid. | |} ---- How accurate is that list, since they have guilds like Crimson Cross listed as both active and inactive? (One is has "the" in the title, but they both link to the same guild.) | |} ---- I understand that but if you told me there were more than 500 non-raiders who spend a decent amount of time in game I'd think you were crazy. It's accurate enough. Apply common sense of course. | |} ---- ---- I've noticed the exact opposite, as of late when it comes to the bolded red. With the case of the former, when I play my lowbie alts at around 4am EST, from time to time, I still run in to people and see names on the nearby players list. Sure it's not like 50 people, but it's still funny to see people at such an odd hour. You also left out "Housing", its community, and the RP community. For the "pros". | |} ---- ---- Problem is that I am fully bis geared (Item level 79 PvE) so I am pretty much *cupcake*ed unless I destroy all my PvE gear. My gearscore ruins the queue for me and every other DS geared player. And yes you might see a player here and there while leveling, especially with the new 10 day trial. But its by no means a flourishing leveling experience you get. | |} ---- No, you said... If you'd said, "There are only half a thousand theoretical raiders if every guild only runs one raid with no bench and nobody else that doesn't raid every single raid day on Exile side," that would be one thing. I'm not sure how many there actually are. But there are far more than a few hundred of us actually playing the game on Exile side on Entity. FAR more. | |} ---- But most raiders aren't full DS geared. Let alone have killed System Daemons (the first boss in DS, for you non-raiders) since DS was reduced to 20 man. I'd wager it's like, 1% of raiders that are in your position. At best. So you're in the minority of a minority. And I never stated that it's a "flushering" leveling experience. Outside of the few first weeks in an expansion, not even WoW has high populated leveling zones. | |} ---- So you feel its okay the 1%(its more actually, a lot more raiding DS) that raids DS and plays the game the most should be punished if they wanted to dive into a battleground/arena? Yes, makes perfect sense. Lets dismish the problem and close our eyes. | |} ---- Practice PVP shouldn't be taking your gear into account anymore if you wanted to dive into it. | |} ---- If thats indeed true then PvP is even more dead than I thought. I can get a BG in 10-20'ish minutes during prime time if I am lucky. I can get a dungeon in less than 5 minutes as healslinger, even as DPS sometimes. | |} ---- Population is Wildstar is good and only getting better. No other MMO out there offers Wildstar's quality combat/gameplay. | |} ---- That wasn't my point. Nor did I say that it was ok. So less strawmanning, please. You tried to act as though "what is an issue for the 1% of 1% in a queue" is "an issue for EVERYONE who queues". They're two vastly different things. The sheer vast majority of people aren't barred from PBG's because of their DS gear, because most people aren't raiding in DS. But lets ignore that, and pretend that our own personal hurdles are the case for everyone else. Cuz "no liek logik." | |} ---- Are you referring to the queues before or after the latest patch? Cause there's a huge difference and should be included. This Screen shot taken today, on Monday at 1pm PST | |} ---- ---- Dunno why it has us listed twice, but we are quite active and have been since headstart! I would not use raiding guilds as the measure of how many players they are. Carbine themselves have said that maybe 5-10% of the game raids. And really, that's true in any game. There are far more people doing non-raiding things. Also, some guilds that raid do not use logs or report progress on Wildstar Progress, so you can't really use those as end-all-be-all either. I think there are probably more people than most think playing Wildstar though less people than we'd all like. | |} ---- ---- I'm on jabbit eu and my longest queue time has been 20minutes and that was at 4am :P Instant queues most of the time. So I'm not entirely sure what your problem might be. Other exiles have been telling me the same so... maybe just too big of an imbalance between exile and dommy now... we get instant pops you guys have to wait turns to fight us :p | |} ---- We wouldn't want people to have access to information now would we, those peasants can get unruly. I'd much rather have solid numbers than "X feels dead, where is everyone, why are Qs taking so long" blah blah blah. Suppressing game health info from people who care, just because you're afraid haters (who will always have something to complain about) will use it to do what they're doing anyways... | |} ---- I'm fine with 'haters' as long as they're not flooding the forums with endless posts about how the game is dead, or how no one plays, or how the Q4 2014 report showed that WS is sinking. I get it. We get it. Carbine gets it. We all @#$%ing get it. If the doomsaying posts weren't as damn frequent, I'd totally agree with you. As of right now, releasing that kind of information will just lead to more whining and moaning. The last thing this forum needs is to give people beating the dead horse a shiny new stick with which to do it. ... also, are you really comparing me saying "don't encourage the trolls" to oppressing peasants? Seriously? | |} ---- ---- I think the point CunningLinguist was trying to make is that knowing the real numbers, instead of sticking your head in the sand and pretending everything is fine, or conversely using old info such as Q4 numbers or anecdotal evidence is the best way to actually have a meaning discussion. | |} ---- That's why I posted numbers. I can post a few more now. As soon as I was able to log into the game (9pm), I went to Academy Corner and checked my nearby player count. 131 people just in that one quarter of Academy Corner. How many were we seeing in November? There's a difference between saying, "Everything is fine" and saying, "People are going way over the line." The game's not dead, there are quite a few people playing, the populations grown quite a bit over the last two drops. I mean, the worst thing we could do as a community at this point would be to dissuade anyone from playing by saying, "Nope, still not enough, game's going F2P, so if you haven't bought in and want to, just wait. And if you won't play an F2P game, don't play this one." People are prophesying their own doom when there's actually a lot of good news around. When you hear people around the outer hemisphere of trying this game say, "I would, but no one's playing" and yet we've got clear indications that people are playing, you have to realize that trying to sweep any positive news under a rug is actually EXACTLY what's causing the problem in the first place. Lots of people are coming back. I've got people coming into the game and actually being surprised that people are playing. They shouldn't be; there are plenty of people on and around. I'm not sure what it is, if people think that Carbine's just going to stop developing content if they think they have "enough" players or if people REALLY want this game to go F2P for some reason and will do anything to make the rest of the world think it's still November, but it does get a little sickening when someone says, "This game has no population... ignore any evidence that there is any. And the reason this game has no population is because everyone hears there is no population." This is why we can't have nice things. | |} ---- ---- ITs probably opposite with dungeon ques yes? Or whats the pop time for dungeon pug que? | |} ---- ---- The difference is indeed massive... I have both a level 50 dom and 50 exile and on any given time i can find atleast 3 exiles to 1 dom in the main cities (not 100% accurate ofc)... We are having 30 exiles vs 30 exiles Warplots on Fridays, and i doubt Dominion can get that many players to join in the fun, but if you guys can, u should queue up on Friday nights too! | |} ---- ----